But did you know Spotify has now given its Web Player a makeover? It’s hard to know why Spotify felt the browser-based version of the app needed an upgrade, but the streaming service has delivered one regardless. Well, we say “upgrade,” but this feels more like a downgrade.

To be fair, Spotify deserves some credit here, because it has achieved the impossible. That’s right, dear reader, the latest update has made the Spotify Web Player worse. It’s now harder to use, uglier to look at, and stripped of its best features.

You could try the new Spotify Web Player for yourself, or you could save yourself from that torturous experience by letting us tell you what’s wrong with it.

Design

Where to start? It’s miserable. Frankly, it’s astonishing that someone at Spotify looked at the new user interface and decided it was an upgrade over the old version. It isn’t.

Check out the new landing screen in the screenshot below:

Only four icons fit onto the screen. Four. For an app that boasts more than 30 million songs, this seems somewhat… limiting.

It’s the same story if you click on Discover or New Releases. Sure, you can zoom out and the page will automatically readjust, but then the menu on the left becomes so small you can’t interact with it.

And where did that red tint come from? Isn’t Spotify’s branding supposed to be green?

It doesn’t get any better if you click on a playlist. By default, the screen can only accommodate the first seven songs. If you’ve got playlists with hundreds of entries, prepare to give yourself a sore scrolling finger.

Not to worry, as surely the artist profile pages will be better. Don’t get your hopes up. Look at Shakira’s page below. None of the relevant information is front-and-center, her top hits, biography, and albums all require a lot of clicking and/or scrolling to find.

Oh, and did I mention there are no built-in navigational tools? If you want to go back to a previous screen, you need to use your browser controls. At best, it’s clumsy. At worst, it’s corporate negligence.

Goodbye Last.fm, Radio, Queue List, etc.

Okay, so the design is a downgrade. But we can forgive that one aspect if Spotify has packed in lots of fresh and exciting new features.

Firstly, there’s no more Last.fm integration. If you scrobbled all your listens to the web’s favorite music cataloging site, you’ll have to move on.

The radio feature has also vanished. If you enjoyed selecting an artist and letting Spotify do the hard work, forget it. All the onus is now on you and your playlists. And your scrolling finger.

But relax, at least you can queue a list of songs so you don’t need to keep revisiting the app and selecting new ones. Sorry, no. You used to be able to. Now you can’t.

The list goes on:

You can no longer see specific songs you saved from an individual artist on their profile page.

Right-click functionality has been removed.

You can’t sort the albums in Your Music by date saved.

The time of the song playing has gone.

You can’t sort your playlists.

It is no longer possible to explore friend profiles and playlists.

You can’t see your followers.

And, perhaps most staggeringly of all, the Settings menu no longer exists.

If you do end up checking out the new Spotify Web Player feel free to let us know of any other missing features you find. We’re pretty sure we didn’t catch them all.

Bugs, Bugs, Bugs

One of the most fundamental features of any music player is the volume control. You want to be able to set your level and forget about it, safe in the knowledge you’re not going to explode your eardrums while listening.

Apparently, Spotify is incapable of implementing this most basic feature correctly. If you leave the window you have the Web Player open in, the volume will automatically bounce up to 100 percent when you return to it. Not an annoying-but-manageable 50 percent, but a health-endangering 100 percent.

Are There Any Positives?

In the midst of all the negativity, I did stumble across one new feature.

It seems like currently playing songs now synchronize between the web app, desktop version, and mobile version. Though I must stress, this worked on my account, but not my wife’s account. So perhaps I should count it as a bug rather than a feature.

In case you’ve lost track of the score, it’s currently 23 severe negatives vs. one tiny positive, and I’m not even exaggerating.

Is it intentionally bad? Is Spotify trying to drive users onto its desktop or mobile apps instead? Did the company simply fail to test the new Web Player correctly? Is Spotify under pressure from record labels to keep people listening to mainstream artists? We don’t actually know. But we do know that the new web player is worse than the old web player, and that’s disappointing.

Please let us know your thoughts on the new Spotify web player in the comments below.

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meekahmerritt

April 7, 2019 at 6:22 pm

The new spotify is intolerable . I paid for premium because I loved the old spotify, but my lists disappeared and now the lists are horrible unless you just listen to one artist at time. Even then.... AND I have to change my password EVERY TIME I log in. Of course there is no customer support. Just infuriating.

I keep getting Popular (radio) artists forced into my ears, such as Taylor Swift and co. I used to hit radio play on a relatively unknown alternative artist and be taken on a musical journey of discovering other relatively unknown artists. Now Spotify seem to force in the Major label artists to my music. I may as well go back to listening to FM.
FFS

So the whole play on other devices thing is totally bugged out as well. I use the web interface at home and and work and when at work it started playing music on my PC at home. I had to remote in and kill my browser at home and then restart my browser at work for it to even start playing here at work... Totally baffling at how bad this new web player is.

So many huge issues! I also find it frustrating that when you look at the Popular tracks on a particular artist's page, it doesn't show the play count like it used to. Additionally, when looking through an artist's albums, the only way to see what year the album was released in is to look at the Copyright year at the bottom of the track list. (I know neither of these are huge issues but I hadn't seen them pointed out yet.)

It's terrible. No question. I can't even get sound to play in it on my Windows 7 Pro PC in Chrome. (Sound works on all other apps, so I know it's not my system.) Everything is so enormous on the screen now that the first time I logged in, I shut down and rebooted my computer because I assumed something in my system had just gotten twiggy. I couldn't believe it when I logged in again and my regular Spotify interface was just ... gone.

I hate everything about it, but obviously, the worst thing is that I can't actually play anything. The song loads. The playback controls are right there. But if I try to play, absolutely nothing happens.

I'm a Premium member and I use the web player at work because there is no way to connect with the desktop app. I have it on my phone and I download playlists which I use on the go. I can't stream it on my phone when I'm on the work WiFi and I don't want to download a bunch of playlist onto my phone. So the web player is / was the only clear option. Now that the functionality of gone, so will I be.

My saved artists are 1)not all listed under my artists anymore 2)not listed in alphabetical order.
This feature seems pointless to have if it no longer contains all of the artists I have saved and since they are listed in a seemingly random order. Am I supposed to memorize the artist picture to find them since that is the images are now huge and take up the majority of the screen?

For the moment, using Internet Explorer still gets you the old interface. I've been using it for a while now and just praying that it never changes to the new, horrible interface. Hey, maybe they'll forget about IE? Most people have by now... It could happen! :[

I can't believe the "Add to Play Queue" feature is gone. That's just a huge step backward in my opinion, especially as someone who chose to pay for a Spotify subscription. If I can't customize my experience, what's the point?

I can't believe the "Add to Play Queue" feature is gone. That's just a huge step backward in my opinion, especially as someone who chose to pay for a Spotify subscription. If I can't customize my experience, what's the point?

I've only just started using Spotify as of about 2 weeks ago, so I was already using this new 'web player' you are complaining about, however after going through your list of complaints, they don't seem very relevant.

For one, I can see 6 icons on the screen, not 4, which suggests they make it fit your monitor size more than anything. Discover and New Releases both show 6 for me too (I'm at the default zoom level of 100 in Chrome).

If I click on the playlist I created when I first joined, I can see 12 songs in the list as standard, not the 7 you guys are complaining about, again, me thinks you guys have a shit screen resolution.

On Shakira's page, it took me all of 2 movements of my mouses scroll wheel to see her albums and singles, with the list at the top being her most popular songs.

I admit the lack of controls for going back is a pain but it isn't too much of an issue for me.

As with sound, that's not really a problem for me either, I can't use headphones and much prefer to crank up the volume on my actual sound system, plus when i'm using my tablet I have it hooked up to my sound system too.

Dan is a British expat living in Mexico. He is currently a Senior Writer and the Affiliate Optimization Manager for MakeUseOf. At various times, he has been the Social Editor, Creative Editor, and Finance Editor. He is also an Editor for MUO's sister site, Blocks Decoded and a Senior Writer for VPN Proof. Prior to his writing career, he was…